Stories

4 things to know this morning about the media

CNN anchor Jake Tapper's debut novel, "The Hellfire Club," is slated for publication in the summer of 2018, per AP. The thriller is set in 1954 in D.C., where main character Charlie Marder — a newly appointed young New York congressman —navigates the dangerous waters of the era and the capital with his wife, Margaret, a zoologist with ambitions of her own.

The WSJ is closing its paywall loophole, per Digiday's Lucia Moses: "[I]t's turning off Google's first-click free feature that let people skirt the Journal's paywall ... [T]he Journal turned it for off four sections for two weeks, resulting in a dramatic 86 percent jump in subscriptions."

The WSJ's top editor, Gerard Baker, is defending his paper's coverage of Trump, per N.Y. Times' Sydney Ember: "Facing tough questioning at a town-hall-style meeting with the staff, [Editor in Chief Gerry Baker] suggested that other papers had discarded objectivity, and that anyone who wanted to work at an organization with a more oppositional stance toward the administration could find a job elsewhere."

Disney Cuts Ties With YouTube Star, per WSJ's front page: "Felix Kjellberg, a top star with 53 million subscribers to his 'PewDiePie' YouTube channel ... has posted nine videos that include anti-Semitic jokes or Nazi imagery [since August] ... On Monday after the Journal contacted Disney about the videos, the entertainment giant said it was severing ties ... Kjellberg is a top earner on YouTube, making roughly $14.5 million last year."